


Voices on the Radio

by theunembarrassedalto



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos-centric, M/M, No Smut, POV Second Person, Screwy Timeline, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-07
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-12-25 22:10:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunembarrassedalto/pseuds/theunembarrassedalto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You knew as soon as you arrived that you should go. But a few days pass and you’re still not leaving. Nothing’s happening to you; that is, you’re not sprouting tentacles and your eyes aren’t changing color or inexplicably multiplying and you don’t feel sick and there are no visible tumors on your body. Nothing’s happening, except something is making you stay.</p><p>Carlos, welcomed to Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Voices on the Radio

Your first reaction when you make it into Night Vale is that you are not sure how anything actually manages to exist in this town. You’re not sure how there’s an Arby’s or a car lot or houses or a school or a public library. You’re not sure why the citizens are still alive. You’re not sure why _you’re_ still alive and you’ve been here for less than a week. You knew the government had done some testing here, but shit, when you arrived and started unpacking,  setting up your lab, you discovered that your Geiger counter was actually _broken_. The radiation here is literally off the charts. The reading was at maximum and the screen was cracking. And half the time you think it’s all nuclear mutations and half the time you think you’re standing over the gateway to Hell itself and every once in a while you wonder if it might be both.

 

~

“Listen to Cecil’s radio show” you heard when you arrived and you started listening and now you can’t stop.

 

~

Your lab is a mess. Your lab has always been something of a mess; for a scientist you’re remarkably disorganized and you wonder how you ever actually passed graduate school sometimes but this mess is different. There’s too much here. The problem isn’t even that your carefully-planned alphabetical organizational system has failed again (although it has), it’s that there is too much to study. Your lab is full of odds and ends that you pick up in the streets, curious objects given to you casually by neighbors and acquaintances, “Hey, Carlos, I found this in the refrigerator the other day and thought you might want to take a look,” photographs and piles and piles and piles of notebooks. You aren’t sure how much longer you are going to live– this place, if nothing else, is making you painfully aware of your own mortality– but you know that even if you lived forever you would not be able to study everything in this place. You would not be able to take everything apart the way you want to; you would not be able to dissect and hypothesize and analyze in the depth you yearn for. It’s driving you crazy. But even though you know this, you cannot bring yourself to clean out the lab. Somewhere in the back of your mind, there is a little voice that says, keep it, maybe you’ll need it. A little voice that says, who knows, maybe you’ll have time.

 

You should clean out. But the clutter remains.

 

~

The first time you meet the voice on the radio is just after you arrive and you are a little nonplussed by this pretty blonde boy whose age you can’t tell, who doesn’t look like he’s even subject to the laws of time, with black wire glasses and a third eye, closed, planted directly in the middle of his forehead and strange shadowy tattoos all over his arms that almost look like they could be _moving,_ but you remember the Geiger counter and you’re not quite so surprised and holy shit, no, you are not thinking that he’s _cute_. He stammers and smiles and he _is_ cute and then you realize exactly what you’re thinking and you want to hide from yourself for a little while because for fuck’s sake he has an extra eye. And he says “I’m Cecil” and you say “I’m Carlos” and he says “I know” and you think could get lost in his voice and then you want to hide from yourself some more. You’ve been here for maybe twenty-four hours, and you’re already going off the deep end.

 

~

When you first came here, you were full of energy, always out and working late hours, seeing everything as a new challenge, a new puzzle to be solved. Now, you mostly sit in your lab and stare at your notes and wonder what the fuck you have gotten yourself into.

 

~

You knew as soon as you arrived that you should go. The radiation levels can’t be safe here, you realized, you need to get out. You thought you’d stay a few days for study; you know the radiation isn’t good for you, but you came all this way, you can’t just leave and you can’t spend all of your time stuffed in a hazmat suit; cancer doesn’t run in your family and you’re sure you’ll be fine.  (You are not sure you will be fine. You know you are full of bullshit but in the name of science, you will not go until you have done at least a little bit of what you came to do.) And a few days pass and you’re still not leaving. Nothing’s happening to you; that is, you’re not sprouting tentacles and your eyes aren’t changing color or inexplicably multiplying and you don’t feel sick and there are no visible tumors on your body. Nothing’s happening, except something is making you stay.

 

~

The voice on the radio says that Old Woman Josie has angels staying in her house so you drive over to her property by the car lot to investigate for yourself. She meets you at the door, smiling, and you think of your own grandmother, so very similar to her. “Hello,” she says, “you must be our new scientist. Carlos, isn’t it? Cecil does like you very much. Won’t you come in?” and before you know it you are sitting on a musty couch clutching a mug of tea and nibbling at a slightly stale sugar cookie as Old Woman Josie talks happily about the town, about the gossip, and you almost forget about the angels entirely until _holy fucking shit_ – 

 

something walks in and it’s not human, it cannot be human, you don’t know what it is but you feel a little sick to your stomach because its eyes, oh god, it has eyes everywhere, and white feathered wings and it blinks at you and Old Woman Josie looks over and says, “Oh, there you are, Erika” and you shut your eyes and reopen them, again and again and again, but nothing changes and there is still an unearthly inhuman creature standing in front of you and okay, you’re getting used to weird but holy _shit_ and Josie says, “Have you met?” and you just shake your head and you hear a sound from the thing with the eyes, a dissonant snatch of music that you are sure means “no” and Josie says, “Carlos, this is Erika. Erika, this is Carlos” and you aren’t sure if you should shake its hand (does it even have hands? all you can see is eyes) but the thing makes another singing sound, more harmonious this time, and you know it is telling you that you are welcome.

 

You go home from Old Woman Josie’s, back to your lab, and you open a notebook to record the run-in with the thing with the eyes, Erika or an angel or whatever the fuck it actually was, but you pause with your pen hovering just over the paper– and you close your notebook and you shake your head because maybe it was radiation but no science that you know can explain that _thing_ and you’re pretty sure you don’t want to try.

 

~

It is your third date before you ask Cecil how old he actually is. He beams at you. “Oh, Carlos,” he says, “are you sure you want to know?” And you think about that. “I’m over the legal age of consent,” he adds. 

 

You think about this, and you eventually say, “It might be better if I didn’t.”

 

~

You will never admit this to anyone, not even Cecil, but you sleep straight through Street Cleaning Day. The night before, you’re up until almost four in the morning, running tests on a piece of wheat bread that you may or may not have obtained illegally from the speakeasy in the basement of Big Rico’s, and you calculate somewhere around two a.m. that it’s probably been more than forty-eight hours since you last slept, and by the time the sun is up you have fallen asleep at your lab table, still wearing your goggles. You’re far enough underground, in your basement laboratory, that you can barely hear the screaming, but your dreams are plagued with strange visions and an awful panicky fear and you dream that you are running, running, away from some unknown assailant that moves more quickly than something of its size ought to be able to, making a low growling sound.

 

You wake up in time for the aftermath, though. You are not sure if it is the sudden quiet that rouses you, or if it is simply the town giving you a little nudge, saying, Carlos, you have somewhere to be. A few months ago you’d have laughed in the face of anyone who said a town, an inanimate object, could do _anything_ , but now you find yourself thinking it.

 

You wander up, out of your lab, abandoning your goggles on the way but not bothering to change your lab coat, and into the sparkling clean streets, and there are people laughing and people crying and someone is singing, clear and vibrant and wordless, and you look around bewildered because you’ve been asleep all day but you follow them to Mission Grove Park and for the first time, for the very first time in all of these months, you feel like the town has opened up and let you in. You feel like you are welcome.

 

~

Okay, so your first week in Night Vale is weird, but you don’t really realize what you’ve gotten yourself into until the day the glow cloud comes through. Everyone is just out and about, under sturdy wood-reinforced umbrellas as the corpses of small animals cascade down around them randomly and the air smells strange– not the rotting death smell you expected, but instead, like springtime, tinged with the faintest hint of vanilla. You shout a curse and duck back inside the doorway the minute you step inside, because a lizard misses your head by about two inches. You bring the carcass of an armadillo, wrapped tightly in some old fabric, to your lab and you run tests on it and keep it in the freezer in the meantime but there’s nothing, everything comes up normal, it’s just another dead animal, except for the goddamn vanilla smell.

 

~

When the subway appears you know you really ought to go check it out. But you pause outside of the entrance and you think– what if it consumes you? What if you go in and you never come out? When you first came to Night Vale you started viewing your death as a fast-approaching inevitability. You even accepted it, with a sort of mental shrug, thinking that at least you’d go out having done something halfway useful. You had your work, and that was the only think you had to stay for, really, and if you were lost in the line of duty so be it. But now– you pause outside the subway and you think, _what if I never come back_? and you realize with a jolt that you are thinking it, not for yourself, but for Cecil. What would your voice on the radio do, if you go into the subway and you never come back?

 

You go back to your lab and write down notes from Cecil’s broadcast instead and when he says he is going to investigate, you shout without realizing it and one of your only remaining research assistants, Hannah, the pretty blonde one straight out of grad school, shows up in the lab a minute later asking if you are okay. You sit with your pen clenched in one fist, your knuckles and the edges of your fingers turning white from the pressure, until the weather ends and there’s his voice, there it is, oh thank fucking god he’s okay he’s okay he’s okay and you drop the pen and you drop your head into your hands and you want to cry because _thank fucking god he’s okay_.

 

~

You came to Night Vale to study, not to find love, but lately you feel like you’ve been doing a lot of the second and you’re starting not to care so much about the first.

 

~

You ask Cecil about the tattoos, too, on your third date. You are both sitting on a bench in Mission Grove Park, a little more at ease than you were the last two times, talking. You could listen to him talk forever; you listen to him every time he’s on the radio but you still think you could get lost in that voice. You want to wrap yourself in it. If it is drowning you, you are embracing it.

 

“You mean you’ve never seen non-stationary tattoos?” Cecil says at your question, bewildered, and you just shake your head because everything you know is upside down here. Tattoos can move and wheat can turn into venomous snakes and things can appear without explanation and disappear in similar fashion, even big things like pyramids, and none of the clocks are real and there’s a cat floating in the bathroom of the radio station and Old Woman Josie brings frightening many-eyed angels grocery shopping with her and you can walk through Mission Grove Park with your fingers laced with another man’s and nobody even bats an eye because let’s face it, a gay relationship is maybe the least weird thing that has ever happened in this place.

 

Maybe that’s why you stay. For once in your life, you feel totally normal.

 

~

It’s a few months before you hear anything from the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Honestly, when you get the vaguely-worded letter in an unstamped envelope in your mail, you aren’t frightened. You’re not even surprised. You’ve been poking around in Night Vale’s secrets for a while now; the warning was only a matter of time. The letter isn’t even very threatening. You politely ignore it, and you politely ignore the ones you get later on, every three months like clockwork. You know they don’t really care about stopping you. If they did, you’d already be gone. Instead they’re going through the motions. In a way, it upsets you. You’re glad you’re not viewed as a threat, but the presumption that you will never find out anything important, that _you_ are not important, grates on you.

 

You confess as much to Cecil one day, in a rare moment of vulnerability, and he kisses your nose and says “Of course you’re important” and you’ve been trying to tell yourself that for years, to soothe the stinging wounds of less-than-perfect grades in school or rejection at job interviews, but now, hearing it in that beautiful voice, you think you could almost start to believe it.

 

~

The second time you visit Old Woman Josie is, in theory, to further investigate the angels. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Secretly, though, you suspect that you make the drive because her smile and her tea and her cookies make you feel like you are home. You’re an outsider here, but when Josie smiles at you and introduces you to the innumerable Erikas, you don’t feel quite so much like you’re not wanted.

 

~

When you first came you were struck by the people of Night Vale. They greeted you with wary curiosity in the streets, and they kept their distance– because for all they knew you were some agent of some enemy– but they never seemed _afraid_. Unwelcoming, maybe, but never frightened. And you’d be the first to admit that you were never much good with people– you prefer numbers and equations and chemicals and you almost failed the psychology class you had to take in college– but you watch them as they speak to each other and you are struck by how very _alive_ they seem. They do not hold back any emotion, they do not repress any thought, they don’t waste time on small talk or meaningless exchanges. And they never seem afraid.

 

You forget the observation as soon as you make it, distracted by the low keening sounds coming from a nearby bloodstone circle, but when it does spring back to mind, absently, a few weeks later, when you see a young couple kissing passionately in the middle of Mission Grove Park, you are no longer surprised. In a place like this– every moment uncertain, every day maybe never even dawning– why _wouldn’t_ you be alive, when you had the chance?

 

Maybe that’s why you stay. Even in this place of death, you are surrounded only by the living.

 

~

The third time you visit Old Woman Josie is the time you realize that she’s only ever spoken to you in Spanish. You haven’t used the language regularly in years– not since you moved out of your parents’ house in college– but it still comes so naturally to you that you don’t even have to think about speaking it. You listen more closely this time; the familiar syllables rolling off her tongue, and your similar responses. You have always loved the language– you learned it, entwined with English, when you were a kid, and when you finally learned how to separate the two you always, secretly, preferred Spanish, even though all your friendships and all your science books were in English. You loved its flourish, the roll of the r, the light, fast sound. You stopped thinking in it sometime in high school, and though you’d never admit it, that upset you more than you cared to think about.

 

You love Josie for bringing it back to you. Your visits become more frequent after that day.

 

~

You meet Steve Carlsberg shortly after you first hear his name said by the voice on the radio. You’re taking a break from the lab to have your legally-mandated pizza at Big Rico’s, though you’ve got a couple notebooks to review tucked under one arm. You recognize Steve Carlsberg without even needing to ask his name; the head bandages, the relic of his apparent run-in with the Sheriff’s Secret Police, are a dead giveaway.

 

You know the voice on the radio, you trust the voice on the radio, but Steve Carlsberg doesn’t look unfriendly, or traitorous, or any of the things Cecil accuses him of being. So you reposition your books under your arm and walk over and sit down across from him. “Hi,” you say, “I’m Carlos” and he says “I know. I’m Steve Carlsberg” and you say “I know” because that seems to be the acceptable response to introductions in this town.

 

And you stare down at your legally-mandated pizza and you know that you should ask him things like how long he’s lived in Night Vale and if he’s entirely sure that he does, in fact, exist, but when you look up and meet his eyes the only thing that pops out of your mouth is “Why does Cecil hate you so much?”

 

Steve Carlsberg, to his credit, smiles and shakes his head. “I dumped him a couple years ago,” he says, and you blink. Oh.

 

“It wasn’t a great breakup,” he adds. “That was sort of my fault. But, well, you know how Cecil is.” And something about that makes you angry because no, you don’t know how Cecil is, would everyone just stop fucking assuming–

 

Calm down, you tell yourself. Calm down. You take a deep breath and instead of arguing you just nod. Because honestly, you do sort of know how Cecil is. “He really does like you, though,” Steve Carlsberg adds. “You might at least get to know him. Whether or not you’re, well, interested, he’s worth your time.” And then Steve Carlsberg picks up the plate left behind by his legally-mandated pizza and walks away and you sit there staring at nothing in particular and wondering whether Steve Carlsberg might, in fact, have a point.

 

~

It is on your third date, too, that you finally ask Cecil The Question, the one that has been hiding at the back of your mind since you first met him the day you arrived in Night Vale and saw his pretty angular features and his pretty amber irises and his pretty third eye, closed and plastered unashamedly in the middle of his forehead.

 

“Cecil,” you say, “are you human?” And he tips his head to one side, ash-blonde hair falling over his black wire glasses and he just looks at you and all of a sudden you are afraid of the answer. You have always been afraid of the answer, but now your fear is bubbling to the surface. You think about his lips and his jawline and his reassuring nose-kisses and his warmth and you think, Cecil, Cecil, Cecil.

 

He doesn’t respond, not really, not immediately. He just looks at you for a moment, for a lot of long moments, and then finally he asks, “Does it matter?” and he sounds so small and vulnerable and–

 

“It doesn’t matter,” you say, and you mean it. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

 

~

As your visits to Old Woman Josie’s house become more and more frequent, the angels become more and more comfortable with you. At least you think they’re angels. They have wings like angels ought to and they are impossibly tall– you still can’t figure out how they fit through the doorways in Josie’s house– but you’ve never seen any painting of an angel with that many goddamn eyes. Now they flit in and out of the room casually, speaking always in that strange musical half-language that you can somehow always understand perfectly. You still do not fully believe that they are angels. You do not actually believe in angels. But Josie seems beyond convinced and, well, it isn’t your place to disillusion her. No, you don’t believe in angels. They’re something else. Aliens maybe, or humans disfigured beyond belief by the radiation, or just yet another one of the as-yet-unexplainable things about this place. You can believe a lot of things about this place, but you don’t believe in angels.

 

At least, not until you hear them sing.

 

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and you’re over at Josie’s helping her with housekeeping and listening to her rattling off town gossip in Spanish, and you’ve just finished dusting off the top of the china cabinet, which apparently the angels usually do (she tells you that they’ve been very busy lately, keeping to themselves and huddling in the corner of the guest room, and that they haven’t been much help around the house but that’s all right because they are guests after all) when all of a sudden the angels start filing into the room, forming a semicircle around the door. Josie smiles at them but you look over warily. They might do anything. You have no way of knowing. You’re tensed and ready to spring, to defend Josie at whatever cost, against a possibly-malicious force, because hell, if wheat bread can be dangerous in Night Vale so can ten-foot-tall creatures with far too many eyes–

 

But they open their mouths as one and they start to sing. You thought you loved the voice on the radio; you thought that voice was beautiful. It is nothing, nothing compared to this. You feel like you are floating away; your world is colors and shapes and sound, oh, glorious sounds, and you want to weep for joy. You thought there was beauty in science, in minute details and complicated equations and reason and logic, but you have never, never experienced anything as beautiful as this.

 

As quickly as it began it has ended, and the angels laugh and sing to themselves, ruffle their wings, a little smug, a little excited. Josie smiles widely and applauds. “Lovely, dears,” she says. “Is that what you’ve been working on these past few days?” They sing assent, and you are speechless; all you can do is stare. You don’t believe in angels. but what else could possibly sing like that?

 

Whatever they are, you think, they can’t really be malicious. You don’t worry so much about Josie anymore. When the Sheriff’s Secret Police drops the six-month note in your mailbox, they warn you about fraternizing with angels. As usual, you ignore them completely.

 

~

During Poetry Week, just after Intern Dana gets stuck in the dog park, Cecil calls you thirty seconds after his show ends, hysterical and talking far too fast and occasionally making little hiccuping-sob sounds. You talk gently, softly, reassuringly; no one’s ever been in the dog park, you tell him, there’s nothing to say that she’s dead. And Cecil says “she was like a daughter” and you say “I know” and you think about when you met Intern Dana; you showed up at the station one day because you wanted to take some photographs of Khoshekh, maybe get a DNA sample, and she met you at the door, showed you around, grinned and told you that you know he can come on maybe a little strong sometimes but that you really should give Cecil a chance. You liked Dana, her friendly grin and her down-to-earth manner and the way she didn’t mince her words or hide what she thought or let anything get her down too far.

 

And you know she looked up to Cecil; you know she grew up listening to his voice on the radio. The girl was, what, nineteen, and now she’s lost in the line of duty to the dog park but you know she knew what she was signing up for. You keep murmuring to Cecil over the phone, knowing that in any other situation this call would be all over the goddamn show tomorrow but not this time, not now. Not for this.

 

It strikes you– he’s so calm and composed on the air, but now, here, he’s not the voice on the radio. he’s just Cecil, ordinary Night-Valean Cecil, the pretty blonde boy with the moving tattoos and the third eye and the lines around his eyes and in his forehead and the unprofessional fatherlike affection for everybody’s favorite intern. You try to tell him it’s going to be okay. You’re not sure he listens.

 

Sure enough, the next day there is no mention of that call on the radio.

 

~

Cecil comes home with you on your third date. You bring him back to the house that you and your team are renting, the one with the lab in the basement and your comfortable room on the third floor. There used to be more of you, filling up every bedroom in the place, but your team’s number has been reduced more than you want to think about. There were ten of you when you arrived but now it’s just you and pretty blonde eager Hannah and William, who is apparently in his early fifties and who seems, honestly, too stubborn to leave or to die or to disappear here. But nobody is in the house tonight, because you casually mentioned at breakfast that this was your third date with Cecil and Hannah started giggling so hard she had to abandon her eggs and gluten-free toast and leave the room, and William just smiled and nodded. And now the house is quiet and empty and it’s just you and Cecil and you whisper a thank-you to your team by the window, hoping that maybe the Secret Police will pick it up and pass the message on.

 

You ask him if he wants coffee, nervously tugging on the end of your lab coat. He smiles at you and says “of course” and you putter around the empty kitchen, banging on the side of the coffeemaker in hopes that it will stop making the eerie wailing noise (it doesn’t), hunting for two clean, non-glowing mugs, since with one thing and another you haven’t had time to run tests on the glowing ones yet and you’re not totally sure they’re safe to drink out of.

 

Cecil looks almost as nervous as you feel sitting at your kitchen table, and you reach out and take his hand, squeezing it gently, when you sit down opposite him. “You okay?” you ask him, and he nods.

 

“Carlos,” he says, “there’s something you should–” but, oh, fuck the coffee, you are up and around and you have pulled him out of the chair and you are kissing him. He squeaks in surprise but relaxes immediately in your arms, returning the kiss, his lips against yours, his mouth open, and you want to breathe every single bit of him in. You want to dissolve into him. You want this. You have wanted this for a very long time.

 

“Carlos,” he insists again against your lips, pulling away just enough to rest his nose against yours, “there really is something you should know.”

 

“Does it matter?” you ask, your voice lower than usual, a little rasping, breathing hard.

 

“It might,” he says. “I, um, I have–”

 

You don’t care. You don’t care what Cecil has. You care that you have Cecil. You don’t let him finish; you crash your mouth back against his and his hands are in your hair and he is holding you close around the waist and he is massaging little circles in your back and– wait–

 

You open your eyes. Wrapped around you are several slim black tentacles. You pull away, very slowly, very carefully. The tentacles relax and allow you to. They are definitely Cecil’s. “Um, Cecil?” you say, and he stares up at you, blinking slowly, his beautiful amber eyes wide and afraid.

 

“Yes?” he breathes. You know what he needed to tell you. You know what Cecil has. You look at him and you think about his lips and his jawline and his warmth and his reassuring nose kisses and you think _does it matter_ and you think about when you asked him the Question in Mission Grove Park that day and the fear in his eyes then, mirrored in his eyes now, and you look at him and you think Cecil, Cecil, Cecil.

 

“Nothing,” you say. “Nothing at all.” And you bring your lips back to his and you can feel him smiling, and you think _I do not ever want to lose this_.

 

Your night is a blur of discovery, heat and newness and fascination and wanting, fireworks in your eyes whenever he touches your skin, togetherness, push-pull-yes-please-oh and you know, lying in your bed with the tentacles wrapped lightly around you, that you spoke the truth that day in Mission Grove Park. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.

 

~

Maybe the clocks aren’t real here, maybe everything is a little bit off, but time still passes. Time still ticks by, and a little bit after a year has passed, you get a call from the university sponsoring this trip, asking what’s happening, are you all still alive, why haven’t we gotten any papers from you yet, you need to get published soon or we’re going to have to ask you to leave immediately. You don’t pick it up, just let it ring straight through to voice mail, and you listen to the message as the dean of sciences leaves it, staring at the answering machine.

 

You have no papers, because you have no significant findings to put in them. Seven-tenths of your crew is dead or missing or lost. You keep trying to run statistical analyses on your data and your calculator comes up with messages like “CLASSIFIED BY CITY COUNCIL” and “JELLY ERROR” and “INSUFFICIENT BLOODSTONE SACRIFICE TO COMPLETE ANALYSIS” and what are you supposed to do? You know you should call the university back. You know they will ask you to leave, and you know that you should do as they ask. You know this whole trip was a failure, a waste of time and energy and the university’s precious money. You should call them back.

 

You change your phone number instead.

 

~

You’ve been in Night Vale for a year and a half when you find your answer. You’re sitting in Old Woman Josie’s living room, eating fresh sugar cookies provided by one of the angels, the black one, who seems to have taken over most of the cooking duties, listening to the voice on the radio.

 

“And now, we go to the weather,” he says, and you lean back wondering what the forecast has in store today. Soft drums, soft guitar, and a soft crooning voice, singing, “I hope tomorrow is like today.” You close your eyes and think of your Cecil, his smile and his little nervous laugh and his third eye opening during sex and his tentacles wrapped around your waist. not calm, collected voice-on-the-radio Cecil; your Cecil, your perfect beautiful Cecil. _I hope tomorrow is like today_ calls the weather and you do, you want every day to be a day eating cookies with Old Woman Josie and studying your notes and kissing Cecil hello as he knocks on the door of your house maybe ten minutes after “Goodnight, Night Vale, goodnight” has been said on the radio. You want to fall into a pattern, to make this your ordinary; you want science-filled days and evenings with Josie and nights, oh god, you want every night to be a night with Cecil. You think, _I hope tomorrow is like today_ and you think Cecil, Cecil, Cecil, and you think your heart could burst with happiness.

 

You came because you were intrigued. because this impossible place was so, well, impossible. You came to investigate, to learn and to see.

 

You stayed because you fell in love; with the voice on the radio, with Old Woman Josie, with Intern Dana and the angels and Steve Carlsberg and Khoshekh, and mostly with Cecil. You stayed because you finally felt like you belonged. You stayed because you are welcome, in Night Vale.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I owe quite a bit of Cecil and Carlos's appearance to the wonderful works of littleulvar, particularly this one:  
> http://littleulvar.tumblr.com/post/59408154550/you-will-never-guess-what-i-drew
> 
> The tentacles was also inspired by this fanart:  
> http://speakfriendandenter.tumblr.com/post/57588210801/their-first-make-out-session-catches-carlos-by
> 
> The mentioned weather is "I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today" by Guster, from their album Keep It Together.
> 
> I can be located at theunembarrassedalto.tumblr.com if any of y'all have anything to say to me!


End file.
